Brooklands did not look like a racetrack was supposed to look, because when it opened in 1907 nobody knew what a racetrack was supposed to look like. There was no template. Hugh Fortescue Locke King, a wealthy landowner who had become frustrated that Britain had a blanket 20 miles per hour speed limit on public roads while France was producing 50 per cent of the world's cars, decided to build one on his estate in Weybridge, Surrey. He employed 1,500 men, spent what would be equivalent to around £16 million today, and in nine months they poured a concrete oval 100 feet wide with two enormous banked corners, the Members Banking reaching 30 feet high, that allowed cars to be driven flat out without touching the steering wheel.
The track opened on 17 June 1907. The first official race meeting was held on 6 July, attracting over 13,500 spectators. Locke King had ruined himself financially to build it. His wife Ethel had taken over supervision of the construction when the stress affected his health. The entire project, described by Historic England as one of the seven wonders of the modern world when completed, was conceived, financed and built entirely by one man and one woman on a private estate. It was the world's first purpose-built banked motor racing circuit, and it directly inspired the construction of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which came shortly afterward.
The outer circuit measured 2.767 miles, making it one of the largest motorsport facilities ever constructed. Daytona International Speedway measures 2.5 miles. Indianapolis measures 2.5 miles. Brooklands was a quarter mile longer than either. The banking at the far end reached such a gradient that cars could approach it at full speed without braking. At those speeds the concrete surface, cracked and bumped and built for the 30 miles per hour speeds of 1906, sent cars airborne. Driving Brooklands flat out was not racing in any conventional sense. It was an act of controlled recklessness performed in front of paying crowds by people who had decided that dying in a racing car was an acceptable occupational hazard.
The track hosted the first British Grand Prix in 1926. Malcolm Campbell broke the world land speed record there in 1909. Percy Lambert became the first man to drive 100 miles in an hour in 1913, then came back to beat his own record and was killed when his car rolled. Count Louis Zborowski raced a series of enormous aircraft-engined machines called Chitty Bang Bang on the banking. The whole enterprise ran on aristocratic money, aristocratic courage and the Edwardian conviction that speed was a virtue.
Tim Birkin and the Blower
Of all the figures who raced at Brooklands, none is more associated with the circuit than Sir Henry Ralph Stanley Birkin, universally known as Tim, who was born in 1896 in Nottingham into a family of lace manufacturers, flew with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, contracted chronic malaria that never fully left him, and returned from the front with an appetite for adrenaline and a total disregard for consequences. He won Le Mans in 1929 and 1931. He won multiple races at Brooklands throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. He wore a polka-dot neckerchief over his racing helmet and raced with a ferocity that W.O. Bentley described as making him "the greatest Briton of his time."
The car that made him legendary was a modification of the standard 4.5-litre Bentley that W.O. himself despised. Birkin, working with supercharger specialist Amherst Villiers, had fitted a large Roots-type supercharger in front of the radiator, driven directly from the crankshaft, producing 240 horsepower from what had previously been a 110 horsepower engine. W.O. Bentley opposed the project on principle and in practice. Birkin did it anyway, funded by the motorsport heiress Dorothy Paget after his own money ran out. The car became known as the Blower Bentley.
In March 1932, Birkin took a single-seater version of the Blower, with a streamlined body built over the standard chassis, around the Brooklands outer circuit and set a lap record of 137.96 miles per hour. The surface was so badly deteriorated that the car was repeatedly airborne over the bumps. Birkin described the experience himself: there are bumps which jolt the driver up and down in his seat and make the car leave the road and travel through the air. He then wrote an entire essay denouncing Brooklands as, without exception, the most out-of-date, inadequate and dangerous track in the world. He raced there anyway, because he was Tim Birkin and that was who he was.
His record stood until 1935, when John Cobb raised it to 143.44 miles per hour in the Napier-Railton. Birkin did not see it broken. He died in June 1933 from blood poisoning after burning his arm on the exhaust of his Maserati during the Tripoli Grand Prix. He was 36.
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The track that war ended
Brooklands held its last race in August 1939. When the Second World War began, the site was handed over to aircraft production. Vickers and Hawker built 3,012 Hurricanes at Brooklands. The Vickers factory was bombed on 4 September 1940, killing nearly 90 workers and injuring over 400. The track surface was broken up and trees planted to camouflage the site from German reconnaissance. After the war, the banking was demolished in sections to allow aircraft to take off and land without obstruction. Brooklands never reopened as a circuit. The site was sold to Vickers-Armstrongs in 1946. What remained of the banking became an industrial estate, a housing development and eventually a museum.
Today, Brooklands Museum in Weybridge preserves approximately two-thirds of the original circuit. The Members Banking still stands, covered in moss and cracked by decades of neglect, rising 30 feet above the visitors who walk up it. A British Airways Concorde sits in the infield. A Wellington bomber recovered from Loch Ness is on display. The concrete that Locke King poured in 1906 is still there.
The Bentley that carries the name
Bentley named its new saloon after the circuit in 1992, and the choice was not sentimental. Brooklands was where Birkin had won race after race in the 1920s and 1930s, where the Bentley Boys had defined the brand's identity as something fundamentally different from its Rolls-Royce sibling: fast, driven by its owner, a car for people who wanted to feel the road rather than be isolated from it.
The 1992 Bentley Brooklands was introduced at the Birmingham Motor Show that October as a replacement for the Mulsanne S and the Bentley Eight, positioned as an entry-level model priced at around $156,500 in the United States. It shared its platform and underpinnings with the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit, and used the same 6.75-litre V8 that had been the engine of choice at Crewe since 1959. It was not the fastest car in the world. It was not intended to be. It was an enormous, hand-built British saloon made of leather, walnut veneer and engineering continuity, and it was sold to people who understood exactly what the name on the boot meant.
Production ran from 1992 to 1998, totalling approximately 1,600 cars including standard, long-wheelbase and Brooklands R turbocharged variants. Bentley revived the name again in 2008 for a limited-edition two-door coupe, of which 550 were built. That car carried a twin-turbo 6.75-litre V8 producing 530 horsepower, at the time the highest torque figure of any production petrol V8 in the world.
The circuit it was named after has been closed to racing for 86 years. Its concrete stands. The moss grows thicker. The Banking still rises above Weybridge. Somewhere out on the old outer circuit, 137.96 miles per hour was once a man and a supercharged Bentley, airborne over the bumps, scarf streaming behind him, completely alive.
Sources: Brooklands Museum official history | Historic England listed building entry 1020137 | RacingCircuits.info / Brooklands | Wikipedia / Brooklands | Wikipedia / Henry Birkin | Bonhams auction listing, Birkin Blower Bentley | Bentley official press release, Blower Bentley centenary, 2019 | Motor Sport Magazine, Birkin plaque, July 1993 | Wikipedia / Bentley Brooklands | Historic England / 10 facts about Brooklands